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Dear Bird Friends!

 

Once again spring is here according to the calendar and the winter bird feeder camera closes. As always we are grateful to all the birds who have come to eat and all bird watchers who engaged themselves in the doings of the birds. Many thanks to Elisa and EENet who have ensured the high-quality video transmission and to BalSnack for filling beaks and stomachs. On the other side of the screen viewers from nearly 80 countries all over the world followed the life of the birds during the winter.

Feeding of the birds will continue until the snow has gone. Our web camera however needs some maintenance before being transported to its next site. Observant viewers have probably noted that foggy images have occurred at times – the internal heating of the web camera didn’t always work as it was expected to.
 

Winter at Otepää has once again been special. This time we didn’t have such a deluge of greenfinches as in earlier years. Of new species a  deer was caught on camera in the evening dusk when it pruned the dogwood that supports the bird feeder. For a fraction of a second a sparrowhawk brushed past the edge of the bird feeder as an ethereal mirage but its prey escaped  - manoeuvring between the web camera and the dogwood branches made the attacker lose speed.

With the enormous overflow of snow this year domestic pigeons managed to get more viewing time. We left the snowdrift as a stepping stone for them, so that the birds would survive this difficult winter. And surely they contributed their part of entertaining spectacle too ... But no point in hiding it, the technical side of the transmission suffered somewhat because of the pigeons – every now and then the fastening screws of the camera couldn’t withstand the large birds landing straight on to the front end of the camera.

 

We will meet again at the bird feeder next winter!